| There can be positives of hiring to increase diversity which aren't related strictly to their performance in the role they occupy. Two such arguments for this kind of policies: - by giving them jobs which they wouldn't otherwise have the skills to fill you are trying to break the "cycle" (more on that below) - having different viewpoints in a team can be beneficial beyond the skill set those people should bring according to their role (ex. for developing apps that don't just cater to the hipster young) Another thing to consider is that the way you measure performance may be biased, resulted from decades of privileged groups having the leadership role in that domain/area and having developed it in certain ways that caters to their skill set. For the "breaking the cycle" part, I mean that systematic discrimination results in people of certain origins simply not having the opportunity/chance to have developed the skills to be competitive with the privileged classes. And no, you can't just fix this by giving them a "chance to learn", some of the negative impacts on these groups of people are permanent and happen in early life. Obviously trying to handle this problem in the workplace is just a "hack", it's too late already but it does have the benefit that now those people get included in a social environment that they would normally be cut out from, get payed more than they would otherwise and, hopefully, this will trickle down to their children and grandchildren so in a few generations of doing this we don't actually need to be doing it anymore. I'm not saying that all of this means I'm convinced affirmative action is doing more good than bad, just that I see it has possible benefits. |
Irish immigrants started out from a culture, where the typical peasant was 1/2 to 1/4th as wealthy as the median pre-Civil War American Slave. There was a period of time when ethnic Irish political machines helped to place the party faithful into cozy government jobs. This was beneficial, up to a point. However, there is a point where such subgroup politics becomes so corrupt, the leaders of that group keep their people in deliberate isolation to maintain their power.
The IQs of many ethnic immigrant groups to the US can be shown to have increased after several generations. The Polish and Italian immigrant groups' IQs increased from 85 to over 100 over the 1st half of the 20th century. There seems to have been a reversal of such trends for African American communities starting in the 60's. There are also studies of the African American children of US armed forces personnel in Germany. Their IQs are the same as other children growing up in Germany. My conclusion is that the leadership of the African American community and the influence of the US political Left, by glorifying a toxic subset of their ethnic culture, is holding the group back, in cultural isolation, in such a way as to harm the prospects of their children as strongly as lead in the water of Flint Michigan.